There's a lot of dark material to navigate, but this three-strong sketch
group's debut Fringe show turns out to have lots going for it, says Mark
Monahan

One afternoon during last year’s Fringe, while innocently popping into the Pleasance Dome press office, I found myself accidentally flanked by Pleasance director Anthony Alderson and his distinguished forebear in the job, Christopher Richardson. On spotting me, they pincered me like an impromptu, impeccably spoken SWAT team, genially chastising me for mentioning every year how hot certain Pleasance venues are. At the risk of irking these grandees again, I have to say afresh that the Pleasance Attic remains a real shocker in this respect – even late at night, you can feel the enamel beginning to melt from your molars.

These blast-furnace temperatures do, however, set up an interesting challenge: any act that can cut through them and hold the attention must have a fair bit going for them. And it is a test that one of this year’s Fringe debutants passes with some style.

Gein’s Family Giftshop: Volume 1: if the archness of the name (for all its serial-killer connotations) somehow evokes the movies of Wes Anderson, so too does this young, three-strong sketch group’s fondness for showing the workings of their art and their refusal to play by the traditional rules. There are, for one thing, almost no props, and Kath, Jim and Ed signal their even flatter refusal of costume changes by wearing, throughout, identical school-gym-kit outfits of white polo-shirts and socks with black shorts and shoes.

These get-ups look ridiculous in themselves, still more so when set against the inspired, blurting sexuality of the opening dance. And the following 20 or so often very-far-from-family-orientated skits (written by the trio with off-stage silent partner Kiri Pritchard-Mclean) resist easy description.

As if in some drama-school audition that’s gone completely bananas, the trio mercurially slip into and out of character, the sketches overlapping and bleeding into each other to such an extent that you aren’t always sure where one ends and the next begins.

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Penises get supposedly caught in cat-carriers and, in one eye-poppingly explicit moment, actually used to move chess pieces; an ape (or is it?) inadvertently reveals that it’s been having a fling with its zookeeper; Jim gets raided by armed police in a mind-palace of his own creation while trying to save Ed, after Kath – out of nowhere – karate-chops him in the neck.

The quality of the writing rather comes and goes. And it often feels more than a little studenty: decidedly icky in certain fixations, and at times outrageous for its own sake.

But there’s still lots to enjoy here. The dynamic between the three is nicely etched, and certain individual standout moments – for all the air of randomness and chaos – are very well timed. Although the subject matter is largely on the dark or adult side – the clue’s in the show’s title, after all – it’s usually also far too silly to be offensive. And despite the air of simmering surrealism that is rather common in sketch comedy these days, the originality of the ideas and deadpan naturalism of the performances – Kath Hughes’s especially – help make the show feel very much its own thing.

Not perfect, then, but a zesty addition to the Fringe even so, and I suspect you’ll be hearing plenty more from them.